Now Open: The Adventure School’s Adventure Store

Adventure is where you find it, you dig?

Adventure accessories, and accessories for adventuring at home, at the Adventure School’s Adventure Store.

In 2002 and 2003, Aviva Palmer spent a year hopping the Trans-Siberian Railway with just a single all-black outfit, a tangle of accessories, and a bunch of balloons and some party blowers in her pack. It can definitely be said that Palmer, who went on to co-found the Adventure School, the city’s most iconic party planning enterprise, believes in traveling with style.

But as the Adventure School’s brand new, just-opened online-only Adventure Store sets out to prove, the Adventurers believe in sticking around town with style, too.

On one hand, the store’s offerings have been selected with a deference for what collapses neatly and folds flat. It’s about traveling sensibly (see the handmade kidskin travel wallet pictured here) and always toting an ultra-packable party — you know, to charm host families along the Trans-Siberian Railway, or once the Amtrak pulls into Portland.

But then again, these party people also believe in the kinds of adventuring that happens in Queen Anne condos and on blankets in city parks and on picnic tables in neighborhood pea patches.

‘You don’t have to be on a trip to have an adventure.’ Palmer told me earlier this week. While sitting in my office wearing a gold party hat. To that end, you’ll click on exotic-feeling wardrobe accessories, pine-scented incense in kitschy old-school packaging (can’t make it out to the woods in dad’s old canvas two-man this summer? the woods can come to you), and a crazy sail apparatus that makes taking your skateboard to the library feel just a little bit more like sailing the San Juans.

Now, please be advised that the Adventure has just begun. By which I mean the store opened its virtual doors yesterday, and merchandise is still making its way on to the shelves. This is the organization that brought you (or more specifically, Lake Union Park) a 25,000-person sunrise to sunset party with 20 bands last September. They don’t do adventure light. There are plans for artist collaborations (naturally; Palmer’s partner-in-parties lives half of the year in Miami, as in Basel), pop-up shops, and a steady rotation of limited-run products.